Building a Fly Camp in Tanzania: Inside the Making of Porini Camp

Iman is charge of the maintenance and the logistics behin Wanyamapori Porini Camp

Field notes from Iman — the man behind the logistics of Wanyamapori Porini Camp

Nyerere National Park (the Selous) · Beho Beho River, Tanzania

There is a particular silence that settles over the Beho Beho River in the hour before we raise the first tent. No generators. No road noise. Just the river working its way over the sand and a fish eagle somewhere upstream. This is where we build our fly camp in Tanzania — deep inside Nyerere National Park, the vast southern wilderness most of the world still knows as the Selous. And building it, truck by truck and bucket by bucket, is my job.

I am Iman. While our guests fly in to the Beho Beho airstrip and step straight into the romance of the bush, my work begins days earlier and far less glamorously — with load lists, water lines, and several truckloads of equipment crawling toward one of the most remote corners of the Tanzanian safari map. This is the story of how a truly wild, remote explorer-style camp comes together, and why every last detail is considered long before anyone pours the first sundowner.

Why a fly camp, and why here

A fly camp is the oldest idea in safari: a light, mobile, classic canvas camp that you carry to the wildlife rather than the other way around. There is no concrete, no fence, no permanence. When the season ends, the bush takes the clearing back as if we were never there. That is exactly the point.

Porini Camp sits on the sandy banks of the Beho Beho River, in the heart of Nyerere National Park — a park larger than many countries, threaded by the mighty Rufiji River system and almost entirely free of the crowds that define Tanzania's northern circuit. We host one party at a time, a maximum of six guests. That exclusivity is not a marketing line; it is a logistical decision that shapes everything I carry in. A small camp can be built lightly, run cleanly, and dismantled without a trace.

The footprint: three guest tents, two big tents, one wild clearing

The camp itself is deliberately compact. The bones of it are simple:

Three classic canvas guest tents — spacious, en-suite in the fly-camp tradition, each positioned for privacy and a clear view to the river, never crowding its neighbour.

A 6 x 6 metre mess tent — the heart of camp, where the day is replayed over dinner, maps are spread out, and stories run later than anyone intended.

A 6 x 6 metre kitchen tent — a full working bush kitchen where our chef turns carefully transported provisions into food that has no business being this good this far from a road.

Back-of-house — staff quarters, the water and shower infrastructure, and the solar power system that keeps the whole camp running silently.

Two large tents may not sound like much on paper. But getting two 6 x 6 metre structures, three guest tents, a kitchen, beds, linen, a wine supply, a water system and a power plant into the middle of the Selous — and making it feel effortless — is where the real work hides.

Several truckloads into the wild: the logistics nobody sees

Everything you see at Porini Camp arrived on the back of a truck, over distances and terrain that punish equipment and patience in equal measure. Building a remote safari camp in Tanzania means accepting that the bush sets the schedule, not us.

It takes several truck loads to move a camp like this. Canvas and poles on one run; the kitchen and the mess on another; beds, furniture and the comforts that make it luxurious on the next; then water tanks, piping, the solar array and batteries, fuel, and the food and cellar that a full-board camp demands. Each load is planned to the kilogram and to the order in which it must come off the truck, because in a place with no hardware store for hundreds of kilometres, a forgotten bracket is not an inconvenience — it is a problem you solve with ingenuity or not at all.

Working in such a remote area brings its own challenges. Tracks soften and wash out. River crossings change with the water level. A vehicle that struggles is a vehicle that waits — sometimes for help that is hours away. We carry spares for the spares, and every member of the build team can turn their hand to recovery, repair and improvisation. By the time a guest watches the sun drop behind the doum palms with a drink in hand, that calm has been bought with a great deal of dust, sweat and careful planning.

Power without noise: living on the sun

A camp this wild could so easily be ruined by the drone of a generator. We refuse that. Porini Camp runs on solar power — panels and a battery bank sized to carry lighting, charging and camp essentials through the night, quietly. The reward is the thing our guests remember most: at night you hear lions, hippos and the river, not machinery. Clean, silent energy is not a luxury add-on here; it is part of the promise of a genuine wilderness.

Water in the bush: the art of the bucket shower

Nothing says classic fly camp quite like a bucket shower — and nothing is more carefully engineered than the water that feeds it. Setting up water in a place with no mains supply is one of my proudest pieces of the build. We establish a clean water source, store it, and run a simple, reliable system out to each tent, where hot water is heated over the fire and raised so that a guest, fresh from a walking safari, can stand under a warm stream of water with nothing but the bush around them and the stars coming out overhead.

It is rustic by design and refined in execution. The bucket shower is a piece of safari heritage; making it dependable, private and genuinely hot, every single time, for every guest — that is the detail. And it is the details, stacked one on top of another, that separate a campsite from a camp worth flying across the world for.

Luxurious, not in spite of the wild — because of it

People sometimes assume that “remote” and “luxurious” pull in opposite directions. At Porini Camp they are the same direction. The luxury is the silence, the space, the fact that the only footprints on the riverbank are yours. It is a proper bed and crisp linen after a day on foot. It is a chef-cooked dinner under canvas, lit softly by solar light, with the river as the only soundtrack. It is six guests, one camp, and an entire corner of the Selous that feels like it belongs only to you.

Everything I haul in over those long, dusty kilometres exists to protect that feeling — to make the wild comfortable without ever making it tame.

Come and stand on the riverbank

Our fly camp in Tanzania opens with the season in June and runs through to mid-March, deep inside Nyerere National Park on the Beho Beho River. If you are the kind of traveller who values space, silence and a camp built — quite literally — by hand for you alone, this is your corner of Africa.

Plan your stay at Wanyamapori Porini Camp, and I will make sure the trucks, the water, the sun and every last detail are exactly where they should be before you arrive.